Apollo beamed with joy. “Can I still be in charge of the children?” he asked, bouncing with excitement. “We’ve figured out some marvelous acts. You’ll be proud of me, honest, and I’ve got some great ideas for Mr. Bopp. …”
“Ouch, my foot,” squeaked Mr. Northstar.
“Oops! Sorry.” Apollo wriggled by him and tumbled into the aisle.
“We’ll see,” said Colonel Kingston, “but we must set some ground rules.”
“Yay!” cried Apollo. He tugged at Moses’ sleeve. “Come on, you laggards. We need to practice.” He raced down the car, ready to lord it over the children once more, and the children dutifully stirred to follow him.
When we reached home, I wouldn’t see as much of Apollo as I used to, now he had younger companions. This made me sadder than I would have believed. Phoebe would be more distant also, now she was affianced. I should be happy for that, but part of me hoped that Phoebe would be jealous of Tauseret. That didn’t make me a very good person, but I smiled anyway. I thought I had the better deal—an exotic companion with tales of distant days and places was superior to an ordinary hairy man from Baltimore.
I was going home—that sank in at last, and to my surprise my heart sank also with the thought. I had planned to be a wage earner when I returned, an independent man.
“You look unhappy, Abel,” said Lillie.
“Everything has gone wrong, and now I’m going back to where I started and I haven’t accomplished anything except murder.” I couldn’t believe that had spilled out of me.
“You defended yourself,” said Mr. Ginger.
“Any man would have done so,” added Frank.
Miss Lightfoot patted my hand. “He’s worried that he hasn’t found his fortune,” she said.
I remembered how Miss Dibble had told my fortune when I was trying to sneak from home unnoticed. “You will fall in love with an older foreign lady,” she had said. I stared at Tauseret in shock. Stars above. Damned if she wasn’t right.
“You’ve certainly brought fortune to others, honey love,” said Miss Lightfoot. “Where would Mr. Ginger and I be without you? You stood up to Mink when we were afraid to. We found strength in you.”
“Willie might not have had his father again if not for you,” said Lillie.
“You can depend on Abel,” said Colonel Kingston. “That’s his finest quality. He takes responsibility. And look at these marvelous acts you have found me, boy. I do believe you have saved Faeryland from bankruptcy. Bully for you, Abel.”
I couldn’t help but grin. All I had wanted was to be carefree, but everywhere I’d gone, I’d had to take charge of something or someone. Apparently I couldn’t be irresponsible even if I tried, but I had certainly found adventure because of it and I may have found my fortune after all. Maybe being dependable wasn’t as boring as I had believed.
“I always thought you had management qualities, lad,” said Colonel Kingston. “We’ll have to develop that.” He ruffled my hair and made me feel like a boy again—safe. “A show’s not a show without a good manager.”
I had management qualities? I had left home because I felt I didn’t belong, and now I learned I had had a needed talent all along. I had found my fortune indeed. It was right where I’d left it.
I looked around and saw love on the faces of my friends.
Yet Mr. Bopp’s eyes were focused far away. He had lost his love. No skill of mine could change what had happened. Life wasn’t that simple.
I stood with Tauseret under an August moon on the road in front of a Maryland train station, the air as lush and moist as a jungle evening. Laughter rang far off as the camels and baggage were unloaded, but here we were surrounded by the tiny chatter of the night.
“Abel, I don’t have anyone but you,” said Tauseret, and for the first time I understood that under her bravado lurked fear.
I put my arm around her. “Everyone will love you,” I said, “and what an act we make. I can see it now—you as my target on a spinning wheel in your mummy form, and as the wheel spins and my knives outline you, you change into the beautiful girl you really are. It will be a sensation!”
“I’m afraid all this happiness will be taken away again,” she said. “That I will never be mistress of my own fate.”
I took the ring from my finger and pressed it into her hand. “This is all that controls you,” I said, “and now it is yours. Once, in another life, you gave it to me to bind us. It brought us back together across the centuries, and now I give it back. You can be bound to me or not, as you choose.”
Tauseret touched my cheek. “In that there is no choice,” she said, and kissed me. “And who’s to say that the ring by itself has any power? Perhaps it needs to be worn by you.”
We stood silent with our own thoughts for a while.
“Will I age now, do you think?” Tauseret asked after a long sigh. “Will I grow old with you?”
“We don’t know anything, do we?” I answered. “We must just live our lives and find out.”
She pressed the ring back into my hand. “I will trust you with my new life.”
I cannot describe how I cherished her in that moment. “I suppose I am an oddity after all,” I said, “to have the love of a beautiful woman three thousand years old. How many can say that?”
“Hey, Abel! I’m riding a camel home.”
Apollo sat atop a camel led by Eddie Bridgeport, and the children ran at the creature’s heels.
“He’s a natural,” said Eddie.
“Me next,” cried Moses. “I’m the oldest next to him.”
“No, you’re not. I am,” said Bertha.
“But you’re a girl,” Moses countered, and popped his eyes at her.
“Minnie’s next, and she rides with me,” said Apollo, settling the matter.
Frank led the other camel around the station. The colonel followed on horseback; Earle drove a cart borrowed from the stationmaster, with Lillie, Mr. Bopp, and Archie Crum aboard. Mr. Ginger and Miss Lightfoot brought up the rear, hand in hand.
“I’ll run the show one day, you know,” I told Tauseret, and I took her arm. We fell in with the others for the journey down the road to Faeryland.
If any children peeked out their windows on that summer night, they might have seen the strangest parade—all of us oddities, all of us going home.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I have always been fascinated by human oddities, so some of the research for this novel was done long before I decided to write on the topic. To add to that knowledge, I dug around in libraries, bookstores, and the Internet, and found way more information than I could ever use in one book. EBay, especially, was an invaluable source of old photographs, known as cartes de visite, which performers sold to make some extra income. I have some on my mantelpiece and I tell people they are my relatives.
The people in my story are imaginary, but their physical differences are inspired by those of people who really lived, and many characters are composites of people I came across in photographs and accounts. One of my original inspirations was Tod Browning’s classic movie Freaks, which came out in 1932 and which I first encountered as a college student. One of the reasons I loved the movie so much when I was a teenager was that it treated with respect the people considered freaks by the “normal” world. There were many times I felt like an outsider myself, so I identified with the human oddities in the film. In the 1960s the media called the type of people I hung out with “hippies.” Less-than-kind people called us “freaks,” but we took on that title of Freak and wore it proudly. I use that title for this book in the same spirit and also to pay tribute to Tod Browning, who endured much criticism and censorship for his attempt to show that even those who look much different still have the same feelings we all do.
Mr. Bopp’s appearance is based on a real-life performer in the movie Freaks, Prince Randian, who performed as the Human Torso for forty-five years starting in the late 1800s. Abel’s father is patterned on Johnny Eck, the Half Boy also featur
ed in Freaks, already a sideshow star in his own right before the making of the movie. The sawing-the-man-in-half performance in chapter one is adapted from a vaudeville act that Johnny Eck performed onstage with his twin brother. I hope he wouldn’t have minded me borrowing it.
I borrowed some other acts too. The ammonia trick Billy Sweet uses to lure the mouse is revealed in Carnival by Arthur Lewis. The bicycle act Abels parents are said to perform may have been similar to that presented in 1897 by the legless man Eli Bowen, and his partner, the armless Charlie B. Tripp. Moses the Frog Boy’s trick of popping his eyes out and scaring the ladies in the audience was really part of the act of Pop-eyed Perry, a much more recent performer, as documented in Freaks: We Who Are Not As Others by Daniel P. Mannix. The ball and tower act in chapter eight is based on one created by a performer named LaRoche in the nineteenth century, described in Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women by Ricky Jay. From the same source, I learned about Joseph Pujol, known as Le Pétomane—the fartomaniac—who performed in Paris in the 1890s. This gave me the idea for the act Earle Johnson thinks up for himself. What Abel says is true; it had been done on the stage in France.
I tried to incorporate accurate details of nineteenth-century life in the shows and out. There were many midget villages in America from the nineteenth century through the 1930s, so Faeryland’s Pixie Village could have existed; and there were genuine tales told of circus elephant ghosts by the train tracks. The songs I use in this book are authentic songs of the time.
I didn’t expect to learn old songs when I began this book, I didn’t know I’d be printing out glossaries of circus slang, and I didn’t know I would fall in love with my characters as much as I did. I may have started reading about unusual people out of curiosity, but what I brought away was respect—respect for people who fought the odds and created lives for themselves. They made the best of what they had, earned a living, loved, married, had children, and left a legacy when they could—just like anyone. We are all different—and how boring life would be if we were all the same—but some of those differences may be more obvious than others, and present greater challenges. Yet one thing unites us—we are all human.
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